Rebecca Willmann: Building a Practice Around the Whole Person
At 46, Rebecca Willmann has built the kind of physical therapy practice she once wished she could work in.
WholeBody Physical Therapy|Running|Yoga Studio, located in Troy,IL, is not centered on rushing patients through appointments, treating one isolated body part or ending care the moment insurance says the visits are over. Instead, Rebecca has created a practice where physical therapy, yoga, pelvic floor care, movement and long-term maintenance can exist within the same philosophy.
That philosophy grew from more than two decades of experience, frustration, experimentation and paying close attention to what patients actually needed.
The Career She Chose at 16
Rebecca knew unusually early what she wanted to do. At 16, a career-interest program suggested physical therapy, and the idea immediately made sense because it combined three things she already loved: exercise, people and science.
Going to Maryville University became one of her first real steps into adulthood. She graduated in 2003 with a master’s degree in physical therapy and began building the career she had imagined as a teenager.
For approximately 14 years, Rebecca worked within corporate physical therapy. She gained experience, but she also became increasingly frustrated with the way high-volume, insurance-driven care could limit what therapists were able to do. At times, she was treating three or four patients at once. Insurance could dictate how many visits someone received, what diagnosis could be addressed and whether additional care would be approved.
Rebecca wanted more time with people, more continuity and more freedom to respond to what was actually happening with the person in front of her.
About two years into her career, she also attended massage therapy school through a program designed for physical therapists and physical therapist assistants. Hands-on and myofascial techniques(work involving the muscles and surrounding connective tissue)became an important part of her approach.
The experience reinforced something she was already beginning to understand: bodies rarely behave as neatly as a diagnosis on paper suggests they should. Pain in one area can be influenced by strength, mobility, posture, connective tissue, movement patterns or several things happening together.
The Woman Who Showed Her What Was Possible
Rebecca’s entrepreneurial story begins long before WholeBody and two generations before her own.
Her grandmother created opportunities for herself during a time when women had far fewer examples of what independence and entrepreneurship could look like. She became the first person in her family to attend college, although that had not originally been the plan. Her father had intended to fund his sons’ education. When Rebecca’s grandmother wanted that same opportunity, she persisted. Her brothers ultimately chose not to attend, and she became the one who went.
During World War II, she played professional ball and traveled around the country before marrying Rebecca’s grandfather prior to his deployment. Later, with a family of her own, she began taking on typing and mimeograph work from the dining room.
The business eventually moved from the dining room into the basement and became a union print shop with its own building and printing presses. Rebecca’s grandfather joined the business, followed by Rebecca’s father and uncle. What one woman started at her dining-room table ultimately became a family business that helped support them for roughly three decades.
Rebecca grew up knowing that story and had an example within her own family of a woman who saw an opportunity and was willing to build something from it.
Her grandmother also left Rebecca something tangible. For birthdays and holidays, she would often tuck $5 into Rebecca’s card while putting another $25 into savings for her. After her grandmother died in 2008, Rebecca invested that money rather than spending it. Over time, she grew it to roughly four times its original value.
Years later, when Rebecca was ready to start Whole Body Physical Therapy, that money became the startup to fund her business.
“I knew she would be proud that that’s where her money went.”
A business started decades earlier by a woman working from her dining room had helped another woman in the family start a business of her own.
The Run That Changed Her Career
Running has been part of Rebecca’s life since 2000, and she jokes that she plans to keep going into triple digits and eventually age into the Senior Olympics until she is the only person left in her category.
Running also played a role in one of the biggest turning points of her career. Rebecca had repeatedly tried to create a running program within the corporate physical therapy environment where she worked. She saw the need and knew she could build something useful, but the idea continued to stall.
One day, while running on local trails, the frustration became clarity. If she wanted to practice physical therapy the way she believed it should be practiced, she was going to have to create the place herself.
Starting Small
In 2019, Rebecca opened her own practice from a small rented room inside a gym. In February 2020, she moved into her own suite in the same building.
Then COVID arrived.
For a moment, she wondered whether the business she had just built was already over. However, when things began reopening, Rebecca had a waiting list. People working from home were experiencing postural issues, stress was showing up physically, and others had taken up running and biking during shutdowns and were now dealing with injuries.
Rebecca hired another physical therapist, rented a second suite and soon began looking for a larger space. She found her current building in October 2020, closed on it that December and opened there in February 2021.
Later that year, while also navigating major changes in her personal life, Rebecca entered a small-business competition through the Small Business Development Center at SIUE and won third place. The prize money helped her build another part of a vision she had carried for years: a yoga studio, which opened in February 2022.
Yoga had never felt separate from physical therapy to Rebecca. She saw how it could support balance, stability, flexibility, breathing, mindfulness, chronic-pain management, cross-training and healthy aging.
What “WholeBody” Really Means
The name WholeBody Physical Therapy|Running|Yoga Studio reflects Rebecca’s belief that the body should be considered as a connected system. It also reflects her belief that people living with pain or physical limitations should not see themselves as broken.
Years of working with chronic pain have shown her that physical pain can affect confidence, mood, relationships, independence and the way someone sees the future. An athlete who cannot participate in the sport she loves is dealing with more than an injured knee. Someone who becomes afraid to move because movement has become associated with pain may begin changing an entire life around that fear.
Operating outside the traditional insurance model gives Rebecca more flexibility to spend time with patients and respond to the person in front of her rather than one diagnosis in isolation. When people have enough time to talk, they often share much more than where something hurts.
Chronic pain particularly interests Rebecca because no two cases are exactly alike. She also works with many people with hypermobility, where connective-tissue differences, joint instability, muscular guarding and proprioception can influence the way pain develops and changes. Symptoms may move from one area of the body to another, making it important to look beyond the obvious explanation.
Her interest in whole person care also led her to complete a plant-based nutrition certification through Cornell. While she does not function as a dietitian, she may incorporate general education around plant forward, anti-inflammatory eating when relevant to a patient’s care.
Rebecca also treats runners, Cross Fit athletes, powerlifters and active adults who may return periodically for maintenance rather than waiting until a small problem becomes a major one. Exercise is equally important in her own life, helping her manage stress, stay focused, parent better and feel like herself.
The goal is to help people continue doing the things that make them feel like themselves, whether that is running, lifting weights, gardening, traveling or simply moving through everyday life with confidence.
A Growing Focus on Pelvic Floor Health
One area Rebecca is especially passionate about is pelvic floor physical therapy.
She wants women to understand that symptoms such as leaking when sneezing or jumping, pain with sex, constipation or pelvic heaviness may be common, but they are not necessarily something women simply have to accept as part of aging or motherhood.
The demand for care is significant, with local waits sometimes reaching roughly four months. WholeBody already has therapists with expertise in pelvic floor care, and Rebecca would like to add another as the need continues to grow.
Life Is Good in Her 40’s
For all that Rebecca has built professionally, some of the greatest satisfaction in her life right now has little to do with work.
Much of life outside WholeBody revolves around raising her two children, Harrison, 17, and Harper, 13. They have watched their mom take risks, build a business and create a career on her own terms.
“My mom owns her own company.”
It is something both kids have been known to tell people. Harrison is even beginning to show some entrepreneurial tendencies of his own.
Rebecca also talks openly about how happy she is in her 40’s. Her personal life does not look exactly the way it once did, and she has found that relationships at this stage of life do not necessarily have to follow a traditional blueprint.
After 20 years together and 17 years of marriage, Rebecca reached a point where she could no longer ignore how deeply unhappy she had become. The final four years of the marriage had been difficult, and somewhere along the way, the two 22-year-olds who had once fallen in love had grown in different directions.
For a long time, she lived in the uncomfortable space between staying and leaving. Ending a marriage felt like standing at the edge of a precipice, wondering whether she was willing to jump without knowing exactly what life would look like on the other side.
Then something happened that gave her the clarity she had been searching for.
“I knew without a doubt that, ready or not, I was doing this.”
Leaving meant dismantling the life she had spent nearly two decades building. It was frightening, complicated and deeply personal, but it also became the decision that changed the trajectory of her life. What Rebecca could not fully see from the other side of that precipice was that choosing herself would eventually lead to a level of happiness, freedom and contentment she had never thought possible.
Looking back now, she understands that leaving the marriage was not the ending of her story. In many ways, it was the beginning of the life she had yet to imagine.
If she could offer one piece of advice to her younger self, it would be this:
“If you ever look around at your life and decide it’s not where you want to be, it’s never too late to reinvent yourself.”
After her 17-year marriage ended in 2021, Rebecca eventually entered a new relationship. She and her boyfriend maintain their own homes and their own lives, with independence existing alongside their relationship. Neither feels the need to measure commitment by whether they marry or combine households.
Rebecca has created a life she genuinely enjoys, and a relationship can add to that life without becoming its entire foundation.
As she describes it, a partner can be:
“The icing” rather than the whole cake.
Her 40’s have become a time of recognizing what works for her—in business, motherhood, relationships and life—and being comfortable with that.
Always a Book Nearby
When Rebecca isn’t working, running or spending time with her family, there is a good chance a book or audiobook is somewhere in the mix.
An avid reader, she makes her way through more than 100 books a year. Audiobooks help her fit reading into a full life, and she gravitates toward ideas that make her think.
One book that recently caught her attention was Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the influential 1963 book examining the dissatisfaction many women experienced when their identities were narrowly defined by marriage, motherhood and domestic life.
Reading it as a woman in her 40’s creates an interesting contrast between generations. Women’s choices have expanded dramatically, yet questions about identity, fulfillment, independence and what makes a meaningful life continue to resonate.
Still Building
From the outside, Rebecca’s path can look deceptively simple: she opened a practice, it grew, she bought a building, added a yoga studio and built a team.
That version leaves out more than two decades of learning the profession, years of frustration inside corporate physical therapy, ideas that did not move forward, a tiny rented room, a pandemic arriving almost immediately after an expansion, uncertainty, hiring, growth and constant adjustments along the way.
Rebecca has also learned that growth does not mean personally doing everything. WholeBody now includes Rebecca and other physical therapists along with yoga instructors and a Tai Chi instructor. Her role increasingly involves recognizing a need and finding the right person to help meet it.
What comes next is not necessarily about becoming bigger simply for the sake of growth. Rebecca wants to expand pelvic floor care, add specialties and programs that make sense and continue finding ways to help people remain active throughout their lives.
Entrepreneurship has become a creative outlet for her, the freedom to notice a need, imagine a solution and figure out how to make it happen.
Keep Moving Forward
Rebecca chose physical therapy at 16 without knowing where that decision would eventually take her. There would be decades of learning, a career she would eventually reshape, a business started in one rented room, motherhood, major life changes and a chapter in her 40’s that she now describes with genuine happiness.
Her 40's have become a time of recognizing what works for her—in business, motherhood, relationships and life—and being comfortable with that.
There is also a perspective that seems to come with this stage of Rebecca’s life. Happiness does not necessarily require life to look the way she once imagined it would. Her family has changed, her career has changed, and relationships look different, but different has not meant less fulfilling.
If anything, her 40's have brought a clearer understanding of what she values. There is room for motherhood, quality friendships, work she loves, a relationship that adds to her life, time for running and reading, and an independence she has no desire to give up. It is less about following a prescribed version of what life is supposed to look like and more about recognizing when the life you have built actually feels good.
There are still programs to create, people to help, books to read and miles to run.
Rebecca says:
“Keep moving forward, because everything just gets better.”
WholeBody Physical Therapy|Running|Wellness
406 West US Highway 40, Troy, IL, United States, 62294
Rebecca Willmann, MPT, BSHS, CMT -Owner
Physical Therapist
Certified Massage Therapist
Postpartum Corrective Exercise Specialist
Certified Running Coach
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